title: Confrontation naming errors in Alzheimer's disease.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  Impairment in visual interpretation, semantic conception, or word retrieval may contribute to the naming errors identified in the Boston Naming Test (BNT). We investigated the possible cognitive mechanism of the naming difficulty in Alzheimer's disease (AD) by analyzing the error patterns presented in the BNT.
  
  
  METHODS
  The Chinese version of the 30-item BNT (BNT-30) was performed on 115 normal control (NC) subjects and 104 mild-to-moderate AD patients. Accurate rates after semantic and phonemic cues were analyzed. The frequencies of 7 types of error patterns in the AD patients and the NC subjects were compared.
  
  
  RESULTS
  The accurate rate after semantic cues was significantly lower in the AD than in the NC groups, but phonemic cues were more helpful than semantic cues to achieve accurate naming in both groups. The AD patients made more errors in all error patterns. Particularly, the frequency of nonresponse errors (n = 806) in the AD group significantly exceeded that in the NC group (n = 382). However, the distribution of the error patterns did not differ between the two groups.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Naming difficulties in AD might be attributed to progressive semantic knowledge degradation. The AD and the NC groups differ quantitatively but not qualitatively in the error patterns in confrontation naming.
authors.affiliation: Department of Neurology, Neurological Institute, Taipei Veterans General Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan, ROC.
authors.forename: Chi-Ying
authors.initials: CY
authors.lastname: Lin
authors.forename: Ting-Bin
authors.initials: TB
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.forename: Ker-Neng
authors.initials: KN
authors.lastname: Lin
authors.forename: Yen-Chi
authors.initials: YC
authors.lastname: Yeh
authors.forename: Wei-Ta
authors.initials: WT
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.forename: Kuo-Shu
authors.initials: KS
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.forename: Pei-Ning
authors.initials: PN
authors.lastname: Wang
mesh_terms: D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D000544:Alzheimer Disease / Q000523:psychology*; D044466:Asian People; D003463:Cues; D003627:Data Interpretation, Statistical; D004522:Educational Status; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012660:Semantics